IDEAS Insights Blog

The IDEAS Insights blog began in 2006 with the aim of providing commentary on IT infrastructure issues. It has since become a well-regarded source of IT analysis and opinion that features in the Top Analyst Blogs list published by Technobabble 2.0.

Contributions to the blog come from the IDEAS analyst team, who are experts in their chosen areas of expertise. The topics covered include servers; storage; virtualization and consolidation; system software; and infrastructure services.

Since the inception of IDEAS Insights, hundreds of stories have been posted. These stories manifest a great degree of relevance to the IT community and often include perspectives not seen in other publications.

Latest Stories

The Complexity of Measuring Cloud’s Impact on Costs

22 Feb 2012

Despite the name, total cost of ownership (TCO) is not the measure of "total cost," as used by economists, but the measure of "accounting cost." TCO calculations measure some costs and are useful for business decisions, yet these calculations always leave out other costs that inevitably only the user can... more »

Widespread Adoption of Flash in 2012 Will Force Vendors to Improve Storage Management Software

17 Feb 2012

This is the third of four articles that review the details behind IDEAS predictions for 2012. The first two articles focused on the drivers of cloud computing adoption and the changing landscape of client devices. In 2012, the lines between servers and storage will continue to blur as systems vendors... more »

Power Management Becomes Much Smarter in HP’s New Gen8 Servers

16 Feb 2012

After accidentally leaking details of its eighth-generation ProLiant servers and blades last week, HP has finally launched the new servers at an event in Las Vegas. Gen8 servers cover the gamut, including rack servers, blades, towers, and scalable systems. This announcement was a little different than past announcements in that... more »

First Look at HP ProLiant Gen8 Servers

14 Feb 2012

The engineering behind HP’s new generation of ProLiant servers appears to be a reaction to thousands of customers calling out to HP support, “Houston, we have a problem.” The problem, in this case, is the time spent diagnosing, maintaining, and repairing ProLiant servers. After analyzing tens of thousands of service... more »

Where to Put Flash for Enterprise Performance?

10 Feb 2012

The approach to utilizing flash for high-performance, enterprise use cases is evolving. Compute-intensive servers have already been enlisted to enable high-performance applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, and more recently virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). But a high-performance storage architecture to match... more »

Amazon’s Cloud Already a Billion Dollar Business?

09 Feb 2012

By now, most technology industry analysts have released their predictions for 2012. Many, including IDEAS, forecast that Amazon AWS would become the first cloud venture to have over $1 billion in revenue. We were all probably wrong. That's because Amazon AWS likely already reached that mark in 2011. The financial... more »

What Server Power Calculators Can (and Can’t) Do For You - Part 2 of 2

06 Feb 2012

In my prior blog post, I compared the capabilities offered by server vendors in their power calculator tools. In this post, I'll give my recommendations for how to use these tools, talk about their accuracy, and suggest some improvements. Power Calculator Do's and Don'ts Rule No. 1: Don’t expect calculator... more »

In 2012, Wintel Will Seek to Reestablish Value of PCs

03 Feb 2012

Debate is rising over the question of whether the computing industry has entered its next stage of evolution, in which the dominant method for end users to access applications and services is no longer through PCs, but through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The battle for client seats... more »

With Price Cuts, Mellanox is Driving 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet to the Masses

02 Feb 2012

With the rise of virtualization, network convergence, iSCSI, and cloud computing, I/O is rapidly becoming a serious bottleneck for many datacenters. Datacenter managers are desperate for higher bandwidth, but solutions that would relieve the bottlenecks remain cost-prohibitive. Today, most datacenter networking infrastructure remains at Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) bandwidth speeds. Server... more »

What Server Power Calculators Can (and Can’t) Do For You - Part 1 of 2

01 Feb 2012

I recall ten years ago standing at the back of a rented 42U cabinet in large data center, staring as the entire stack of servers suddenly lost power. I had just plugged two new servers into the cabinet’s power feed. I was following a then-common method of power planning: adding... more »